Categories

Designer Memes (Ideation)

Welcome to the designer meme, the home of all things Ideation (and, by extension, innovation) related. This is the place where I blog about my creative stuff – my thoughts and my ideas. The areas I’ll be covering include:

There are two kinds of people: the ones who grab a hold of an idea and develop it because they struggle to have them, and every idea is precious. These are the kinds of people who need to protect their intellectual property because you can’t copyright an idea. They come, and if you don’t use them, they go. If you are one of these people, do not talk about your ideas until you are ready to exploit them.

The second kind of people are those to whom ideas are constant. Some get used, and some fly away to roost elsewhere. I am lucky to be one of these people. I share my ideas openly because if someone steals them they I have learned they have no integrity and move on to the next idea. If someone asks to use my idea for a credit, even better. It’s one less idea for me to develop!

Now the problem is that some people think these two types are mutually exclusive. That if you cannot have ideas you never will.

That’s rubbish. There are tools out there, from the project management/strategy development school (Boston Box/Six Hats/Fishbone etc) to what I call the random collider effect.

I get most of my ideas talking to myself. Or to someone else, but that way you end up arguing over whose idea it was. Yes, you call it the first sign of madness but I call it the imaginary muse. At some point I’ll talk about Julian Jaynes. When I do all will make sense. And just by mentioning his name the imaginative among you will have googled him, wondered what the hell I’m on about and maybe, just maybe, have connected the dots and got my point. If you didn’t… patience.